Splat’s Spring Cleaning Guide: Part One

April 11, 2018

It’s a great time to change the batteries in your smoke detector, switch your seasonal wardrobes and also optimize your digital day! So put away your DustBuster and your Swiffer Jet…there’s an app—or a web-based tool—for that. The days are getting longer which means now you have more time get organized all in the name of efficient productivity, robust functionality and overall ease. So as to make this content more digestible and web-friendly, we decided to make this a two-parter. If you’re of the OCD (Outrageous Computer Data) sect, then read on to help tame your digital game.

Memory/Space

We’re not talking Bausch and Lomb people. If you’re looking to clean pesky duplicate contacts, clean contacts that no longer have a phone number or email and quickly remove contacts (like that boy who said “uh yeah…I’ll call you sometime), Then consider this app your BFF. We love it because it does what it’s supposed too. Our before and after experiment revealed that it improves your phone’s speed an functionality. Many use this app after deleting photos and other unused apps. It also monitors and checks memory (RAM) for free.

If you don’t have tons of memory on your iPhone to begin with, it’s strategic to keep files neat and orderly. But most times we don’t have the tools in iOS to optimize memory and to free up space for the important stuff like those booze cruise pics and vids from like 9 months ago. Well, this app cleans house and frees up space like a housekeeper who overdosed on 5-minute energy shots. In just 3 passes, your iPhone’s memory is tidy and ready for you to enter more.

Desk top Functionality/Performance

You can download a free trial or it can instantly be yours for under $5 as long as you have OS X 10.7 or later. Ever wake up in the middle of the night feeling like you just want to save Gigabytes of Hard Drive Space? We’ve all been there. The app will locate duplicate files of any kind, including: images, audio and video files, archives, folders and much more. It’s also a joy to navigate and can be mastered by any fifth grader.

Everyone loves a free app especially one that can shrink your library of snaps and improve speed/performance. Duplicate Cleaner For iPhoto is a thoughtful app designed to deal with duplicate photos and videos in your iPhoto or Photos App. It makes the tedious task of finding and removing dupes in iPhoto and turns it into a cakewalk by simply moving all duplicates to iPhoto trash which means now it’s safer than ever to remove duplicates. It’s also great if you have kids and say 96,000 pics!

Got a MacBook Pro? Looking for it to run better than Haile Gebrselassie? Download this app to clean and speed up your machine if it’s slowing down. Not only does this Application speed up your Mac by freeing up RAM; it also cleans temporary files (for example; tmp, txt, log files, plist files, and other temporary files that take up space), and it does a ton of other useful things. Clear your computer’s cache of temporary files from browsers and other programs. This is one doctor bill you won’t mind paying.

This app lets you delete unwanted apps with just a click (yay!) One feature we’re loving is that one must confirm that he/she truly wants to remove a program. With previous, earlier iterations of cleaners, it was actually possible to accidentally drag the wrong app icon from finger onto it’s window and yikes, it was dust! The other nice touch is the way the app asks if it can do a scan for existing apps in case you have added a lot more since the last use. Pro deletes an application’s service files so that they aren’t eating up precious space. This app does all the legwork for you.

Online Reputation Management

In the age of instant everything, setting Google Alerts just isn’t enough to stay on top of all the fodder. You need talkwalker especially if you’re in PR. Talkwalker’s Free Social Search lets you dig deeper into your reputation management so you can quickly see sentiment towards your brand, products or services over the last 7 days and understand exactly what posts, tweets and articles are driving social activity about your brand. Data coverage spans both social networks as well as over 150 million websites (whoa) so you get a full view of brand reputation across social, online news, blogs, forums and more. There’s no limit to the number of searches you conduct and you get results back in seconds. Bonus: this app can tell you what social channels work best for your brand and it can identify your next big hashtag before it blows up.

Review Trackers is a helpful paid tool that aids in tracking of your customers’ reviews and it also measures the customer experience across over 80 sites and sources. It collects all your reviews in one dashboard and sends email reports to keep you up to date. Reporting functions help you track the performance of multiple locations and there’s feature that detects patterns in customer feedback so you can easily see which topics your customers talk about the most. We also love their blog and their customer support is also stellar. Single-location plans start at $49 per month. Multi-location plans for $18-$39 per location. You can try it before you buy it 🙂

Website Structure

When was the last time you looked at your website menu with a critical eye? How about the last time you checked your overall messaging to make sure it was coherent, well organized and easy to read on the web? Are your blog posts categorizing correctly? Is your website optimized for mobile viewing audiences in the best way possible? Are your photos up to date? Going from chaos to contentment can be an arduous task and there’s not really a single app that can serve as a magic wand. This article published by our friends at Yoast is a great read especially if you’re struggling to clean up your site.

(Insert shameless promotional plug here…okay, thought you’d never ask.) At Splat, a thorough site audit is part of our initial intake step that allows us to see where improvements can be made. If your interested in your website’s overall look and performance, contact us at jami@splatworldtv.com.

Test how easily visitors can use your page on a mobile device. Just enter a page URL to see how your page scores. You can also see if there are any loading issues. Search Console alerts you about critical site errors such as detection of hacked content, and helps you manage how your content appears in search results. Decent mobile presence is more important in 2018 than ever before because users spend on average 69% of their media time on smartphones (comScore).

Every web designer worth their weight in HTML should embrace the best practices of responsive web design (how to get your sites to render perfectly no matter what the device, or screen size. Responsnator is simple so you might find yourself saying “I’ll be back” a few times like Arnold. All you have to do is type in your URL and it wil show you how your web page renders in the most popular screen shapes and sizes. Oh, and it’s free.

LinkChecker is a free website validator. LinkChecker checks links in web documents or full websites to make sure that they actually lead somewhere. If you’re site is deep and you’ve got multiple links throughout, it’s a good idea to check them from time to time to ensure that sources you’ve linked to are still functional. Nobody likes clicks that lead nowhere.

The Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a website crawler, that allows you to crawl websites’ URLs and fetch key onsite elements to analyze onsite SEO. Download for free, or purchase a license for additional advanced features. There’s a free version which certainly made us scream. The SEO Spider is powerful, flexible and able to crawl both small and very large websites efficiently, allowing you to analyze the results in real-time. It gathers key onsite data which allows SEOs to make informed decisions. Answer to our riddle? “If something is bugging you, I can take you out for a spin.”

Subscribe to Sitegeist

Got a Project?

If you've got a project you'd like to discuss, we're all ears! We'd love for you to tell us a little bit about your needs and we'll respond promptly.

Name

Email*

Phone*

Message

Phone

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Subscribe to Sitegeist

HELP US HELP YOU

We're committed to bringing you the latest insights in web design, development and inbound marketing. Won't you take a moment to join our mailing list? (And, don't worry, we would never share your email with anyone.)